Lonnie Schlein, was the Metro desk photography editor for The New York Times 25 years ago and on the anniversary of the terrorist attack, Schlein remembers what happened the morning of September 11, 2001. He spoke with KRWG's Susan Morée. You can watch the full episode on KRWG-TV on "Fronteras: A Changing America" at 7 p.m. Thursday.
Susan Morée:
Take us back to that day. At 8:46 a.m. the first plane dove into the North Tower. At 9:03 a.m. the second plane hit the South Tower. Where were you in that moment?
Lonnie Schlein:
Okay, so we lived at Waterside Plaza in Manhattan, which is adjacent to the 34th Street Heliport in New York and built into the river. And it consists of four 36-story buildings. And we didn't live in the southernmost tower. So the first thing that happened was, we had a guest from Germany staying with us, a young woman who was a daughter of a friend of my wife's. And I heard this incessant knocking on the door. That bedroom, which was our daughter's bedroom, did look at the very tip top of one of the towers.
Susan Morée:
Oh, wow.
Lonnie Schlein:
And she woke me up with pounding on the door. 'There's a fire in that big building,' she said. She had no idea there was a plane involved. And I quickly ran. It took me two minutes to get to the room before my phone rang. And it was The New York Times picture desk. First word was a small plane had hit. This is what so many people thought, a small plane had hit one of the towers. So they asked me to take a camera and go to the southernmost tower of Waterside Plaza and shoot whatever I could and then get into the office immediately. Unfortunately, we had an upstate home. That's not unfortunate. What was unfortunate was that all of my camera gear was upstate at our house. All I had at home was a 3.5 megapixel camera, not enough to really capture detail that far away. But somehow or other I got to the roof of the tower and I got a few frames, just a few frames, and one of them worked. And the next thing I was on the way to the office and I walked into a rather frantic newsroom to say the least. And it was then clear by the time I got there. I actually watched, both towers were in flame when I got to the roof of the Waterside Plaza Tower. So we knew it was a terrorist attack. I didn't get the details, of course, until I got into the office.
Susan Morée:
And you had just started on the Metro side of the newspaper. Can you talk about that?
Lonnie Schlein:
Yes, I had been a national photo editor at The New York Times for 10 years. And that summer of 2001, I was on vacation for a month and I got a call from one of my superiors asking if I'd be interested since I'd been there for 10 years and doing a whole new thing, moving to the metro section. The exciting prospect of it was that it was going to be redesigned to give the biggest photo display of anywhere in the paper. And you'd have 36 staff photographers reporting to you. You can't turn this down, can you, Lonnie? And I said, I don't think so. And though I was reluctant to give up, because the national photo editing job at The New York Times is really a highly coveted position. It's something that every photo editor in New York would dream of having. And I was lucky enough to have it for 10 years.
Susan Morée:
That must have been, I can't imagine what that was like. Wasn't it your second day of work in that new position when 9-11 happened?
Lonnie Schlein:
It was the second day of work. And when I arrived in the office, we were all, the top editors were meeting, and I mean the executive editor, managing editor, and lots of other people meeting in what we called the page room, conference room. And I was ordered to quickly appear with as many photos as I can get my hand on. But there was a period between my arrival and when the page one conference room started to take place. So I was editing staff photographers who had been to Ground Zero and freelancers and looking at the wires. So there were tons of pictures and I could not walk in to the executive editor and say, 'hey, look what I have.' So I had to try to whittle it down to a usable number of pictures. I walked in there with the pile of pictures and everyone started scattering them all over the table and trying to figure out what the page one likely pictures were going to be and what we were going to use inside. And there was very little argument, very little dissent. Everyone sort of agreed on my proposals with the executive editor, of course, who was then Howell Raines, who was newly appointed executive editor. And he was hit bang with 9-11, right on. And so we looked through all these pictures and the only discussion really was about the falling bodies pictures. There were some people, a few, who thought that should go on the front page and I disagreed. The feeling was quickly that picture must go inside. You need the event, the event on the front and emotion inside and that's really the way we looked at both the cover and all the jump pages as we call them.
